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This petition went up on the White House “We The People” website yesterday. They’re looking to get 100,000 signatures by April 19th. Since most politicians’ campaigns are largely funded by wealthy companies and individuals, it would give voters a better sense of who the candidate they are voting for is actually representing if the company’s logo, or individual’s name, was prominently displayed upon the candidate’s clothing at all public appearances and campaign events. Once elected, the candidate would be required to continue to wear those “sponsor’s” names during all official duties and visits to constituents. The size of a logo or name would vary with the size of a donation. For example, a $1 million dollar contribution would warrant a patch of about 4” by 8” on the chest, while a free meal from a lobbyist would be represented by a quarter-sized button. Individual donations under $1000 are exempt.

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There’s no shortage of cafes in Tokyo, but FabCafe has a little more on its menu than most. Opened just over a year ago, the establishment offers its own laser cutter that customers can rent by the hour, and also collaborates with the 3D printer showroom upstairs. The showroom is called Cube and features several printers made by South Carolina-based 3D Systems, making FabCafe a hot spot in Tokyo for anyone who needs something fabricated but can’t justify the multi-thousand dollar outlay on a machine of their own.

One and a half million laptops given to poor students by India’s largest state government crash if their users try to remove pre-loaded screen savers featuring pictures of the new chief minister.

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It’s hard to imagine how an entire city can get lost but that’s exactly what has happened to the lost cities on this list. There are actually many reasons why a city has to be abandoned. War, natural disasters, climate change and the loss of important trading partners to name a few. Whatever the cause, these lost cities were forgotten in time until they were rediscovered centuries later.

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When your life is nothing but trolling and viral videos, having a bad wi-fi connection can be incredibly irritating. Poor loading times, lost connections, and more can put a strain on your time browsing the internet. However, there are some ways to improve your Wi-Fi connection. However, even in the most bleak situation, there are heroes, and in this case it’s soda cans. If you’ve ever had a TV with an antenna or a radio, you’ve probably heard of the trick of using tin foil to improve the signal. Using a soda or beer can to improve your wi-fi signal works in a very similar way. The metal in the can and the shape of the can when cut open can focus the signal to and from your router. The only things that you’ll need to achieve this are a beer or soda can, a utility knife, a pair of scissors and some form of adhesive that can easily be removed like tape or adhesive putty.

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Authorities say the use of nitrous oxide as a recreational drug has grown from a rave party phenomenon to mainstream use, propelled by the ease of social media to reach young people. They say the drug has spurred fatal car accidents, rapes and teen deaths — all in the name of a temporary high that lasts just a few minutes and costs just a few dollars. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials have zeroed in on the recreational use of the drug since September, cracking down on more than 350 illegal parties, nearly all of which were selling nitrous oxide, or “noz,” spokesman Mike Parker said Thursday.

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Authorities found two-2 gallon jugs of PCP concealed in containers of Lipton Sweet Tea in Allen’s Porsche on Nov. 5, 2012 when they raided a storage locker on Lake Road in Vermilion. A loaded handgun was also recovered from the storage locker but was not stolen. Allen was arrested the same day during a traffic stop in Westlake on I-90 after authorities found another gallon of PCP in the back of his Escalade, according to Lorain County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Dennis Cavanaugh, who also heads the Lorain County Drug Task Force. A total of 111,364 milliliters of PCP were recovered in total. The drug sells for $120 to $140 a gram, said Cavanaugh.

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One gram of heroin, two grams of cocaine, 25 grams of marijuana leaves or five grams of hashish: These are the drug quantities one can legally purchase and possess in Portugal, carrying them through the streets of Lisbon in a pants pocket, say, without fear of repercussion. MDMA — the active ingredient in ecstasy — and amphetamines — including speed and meth — can also be possessed in amounts up to one gram. That’s roughly enough of each of these drugs to last 10 days. These are the amounts listed in a table appended to Portugal’s Law 30/2000. Goulão participated in creating this law, which has put his country at the forefront of experimental approaches to drug control. Portugal paved a new path when it decided to decriminalize drugs of all kinds. “We figured perhaps this way we would be better able get things under control,” Goulão explains. “Criminalization certainly wasn’t working all that well.”

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As far as I can tell, police departments employ two main strategies when they’re under pressure to cut crime fast. In strategy no. 1, they flood crime zones with special police units that muscle criminals and contraband off the streets. In strategy no. 2, they simply downgrade crimes, or make it more difficult for citizens to report them. The Dallas police department chose the latter strategy last year when it announced that police officers would no longer respond in person to shoplifting incidents involving items worth $50 or less. Instead, victimized merchants were instructed to print a form off the DPD website, fill it out, and put it in the mail. According to the Dallas Morning News, the new process has been a huge hassle for merchants. “Retailers overwhelmingly described a time-consuming process with onerous paperwork requirements,” reported Tanya Eiserer and Steve Thompson.

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Over a third of Americans have a venereal disease, according to the CDC. At the present rate, those who have problems with their personal equipment will surpass those with jobs by the end of Obama’s second term. The CDC finding that 110,197,000 Americans have an STI (Sexually Transmitted Infection) was reported by CNS News. In 2008, the last year reported, 19.8 million Americans contracted STIs.

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Forty-five years after Timothy Leary, the apostle of drug-induced mysticism, urged his hippie followers to “turn on, tune in and drop out”, researchers have found that magic mushrooms do change a user’s personality – for the better. The fungi have long been known for their psychedelic effects, but far from damaging the brain, the hallucinogenic drug they contain enhances feelings and aesthetic sensibilities, scientists say. The study, at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore, found that a single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, was enough to cause positive effects for up to a year. “Psilocybin can facilitate experiences that change how people perceive themselves and their environment,” said Roland Griffiths, a study author and professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at Johns Hopkins. “That’s unprecedented.”

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We score all 50 states on over 200 policies encompassing fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and personal freedom. We weight public policies according to the estimated costs that government restrictions on freedom impose on their victims.

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But what’s perhaps most troubling to Internet freedom advocates is how the new CFAA even expands the law to include accessing information for an “impermissible purpose,” which means even if you have the right to access the information in the first place, it’s still considered a crime if someone deems you are misusing your access in some way. According to Kerr, a computer law expert, the language in the new CFAA would make it a felony to “lie about your age on an online dating profile if you intended to contact someone online and ask them personal questions,” or if you violate the terms of service on a government website. “In short, this is a step backward, not a step forward,” Kerr said. “This is a proposal to give DOJ what it wants, not to amend the CFAA in a way that would narrow it.”

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In the new song, “You Don’t Even Know It,” by Rocko, Future, and Rick Ross, the self-proclaimed boss drops a troubling lyric that shows he knows very little about rape. Just after he opens his verse, Ross raps: “Put molly all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / I took her home and I enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it.”

About two years ago, citizens in Cherán, Mexico decided to battle illegal logging and drug violence by kicking out the police and running the town according to indigenous tradition.

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The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees’ antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases. Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect’s exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn’t easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

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A selection of articles giving warning about the dangers of cloud computing… What’s going on with your notes, records, e-mail, photos, documents, videos, scans, etc.? Privacy, Encyption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 era Google connections to NSA/CIA Massachusetts Looking to Tax Cloud Services 51 Security Worries About Cloud Computing What’s In Your ‘Digital Wallet’? – Why They Are Pushing Digital Wallets… FBI Drive for Encryption Backdoors Is Deja Vu for Security Experts Postal Service to Host Public-Private ID Protection Network Encryption Could Drive Government to Break Into Your Cloud IRS Leaves Taxpayer Data Insecure, GAO Finds Is Your TV, Game System or Other Device Watching You? Feds: No Warrant Needed to Track Your Car with a GPS Device Driven by the Elite: Nasdaq on the Virtues of the Public Cloud The More You Encrypt, the More the Government Breaks Into Your Cloud Microsoft Details Law Enforcement Information Requests in New Report

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This was on my mind as much as the mysterious personality of David Bowie when an Irish cabbie drove Burroughs and me to Bowie’s London home on 17 November (“Strange blokes down this part of London, mate”). I had spent the last several weeks arranging this two-way interview. I had brought Bowie all of Burroughs’ novels: Naked Lunch, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded and the rest. He’d only had time to read Nova Express. Burroughs for his part had heard only two Bowie songs, ‘Five Years’ and ‘Starman’, though he had read all of Bowie’s lyrics. Still they had expressed interest in meeting each other.

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Take the example to the left. This terrifying contraption is called a ‘jugum penis.’ It was designed to prevent both masturbation and ‘nocturnal incontinence.’ Should a man become aroused in the middle of the night, this contraption would clamp down, extinguishing both his desire as well as his erection in a very sudden and painful way! But why were the Victorians so obsessed with what they termed ‘self-abuse?’ Many medical practitioners during this period believed that masturbation caused a wide range of mental and physical disorders, and could even prove fatal over time. Doctors and surgeons alike devoted their lives to finding a ‘cure.’

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Deputies were called to the Crestwood Suites on University Boulevard after multiple 911 callers “reported screaming and growling sounds from a room on the second floor” of the hotel. They arrived to find the victim “covered in a significant amount of blood, with numerous bite wounds,” the report states. He was rushed to the Orlando Regional Medical Center trauma center. The man had “significant” bites to his penis and testicles, the report states, as well as damage to his leg, abdomen, chest and fingers. His alleged attacker, Priscilla Vaughn, “was nude, and had blood around her mouth, which had spread to her face and head,” the report states, adding Vaughn “growled and snarled” at deputies.

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A team of international researchers headed up by the University of Michigan has used noninvasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to release endogenous opioids — the human body’s most powerful, euphoria-inducing painkillers that are very similar to opiates such as morphine. This approach is significant because releasing these opioids is as simple as strapping a couple of damp sponges to your scalp and attaching a 9-volt battery.

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Of course, most people have no idea what the police can pull off of your phone when it’s searched, but the ACLU has, thankfully, revealed some documents that ICE filed in a court case. It turns out they can get quite a lot. Using a single “data extraction session” they were able to pull: call activity phone book directory information stored voicemails and text messages photos and videos apps eight different passwords 659 geolocation points, including 227 cell towers and 403 WiFi networks with which the cell phone had previously connected.

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Roadkill salvage and consumption remains a fringe activity, mainly practiced by so-called “freegans” and other culinary subcultures. In Alaska, however, those who utilize soup kitchens are likely to have had a taste, since fresh roadkill is regularly given to charities. Interestingly, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which opposes most forms of hunting, has pushed states to adopt “roadkill salvage” legislation so as not to let animals go to waste.

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This website is designed as a social mirror to show the prevalence of casual homophobia in our society. Words and phrases like “faggot,” “dyke,” “no homo,” and “so gay” are used casually in everyday language, despite promoting the continued alienation, isolation and — in some tragic cases — suicide of sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ) youth.

CCTV footage released by West Midlands Police shows dozens of people running to be first in line as a drug dealer arrives in a Birmingham street.

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How is breast massage therapy performed? Breast massage therapy is performed with the patient lying flat on her back on a massage table. If the patient so desires, the massage may be performed with the breasts covered with a cloth. However, this greatly hinders the massage therapist and reduces the effectiveness of the massage. The massage therapist will usually start by massaging the area under the breast and over the breast with the palms of the hand. At any point in time if you are feeling uncomfortable or feel that too much of less pressure is being exerted, do not hesitate to tell your therapist. No therapist can read your mind. The therapist will then move to massage the sides of the breast. The next step of the massage is the breast lift. The therapist places his or her hands under your breasts and gently lifts them towards the ceiling. This helps to relieve stress from the breasts and promotes gentle stretching. Finally the therapist will gently massage the pectoral muscles.

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A dog in Oklahoma City came home on Saturday carrying a dead newborn in its mouth. A house sitter, whose name has not been released, was at the home at the time, KOCO reported. The house sitter told KFOR that the dog, a 6-month-old mixed-breed named Luke, showed up at the door with the body of a three to five-pound infant in his mouth. “He was carrying it just like a momma pup,” she told the station, “and laid it at my feet.”

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T.J. Lane will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing three students and wounding three others in the Chardon High School cafeteria Feb. 27, 2012. Before his sentence, Lane, wearing a white T-shirt with the word “killer” written across the front, said: “This hand that pulled the trigger that killed your sons now masturbates to the memory. F— all of you.”

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If any Foodie Flick could blow your mind, it’s this one. British comedian George Egg recently posted a YouTube video in which he cooks dinner in his hotel room. We’re not talking about a quick salad and sandwich here. Without bringing any special tools from home, Egg sweeps aside the overpriced room-service menu and makes pasta and biscuits in his room — from scratch. No hot plate. No microwave. If it wasn’t captured in a video, we probably wouldn’t believe it. The entrée? A tortellini pasta with spinach, rocket and crème fraîche that he cooks in the room’s tea kettle. This might not leave a desirable taste for the next poor sap who makes tea, but it’s a rather ingenious way to boil noodles. (He adds a raw egg yolk in a nod to carbonara; emulate that at your own risk.) Oh, but there’s more: Egg ups the ante by making biscuits (kneaded, risen, the whole 9 yards), using a clothes iron. Color us a new shade of impressed.

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The tools you need are simple: an electric drip coffee maker with hot plate, a coffee filter, 2 1-liter glass sample jars with air-tight lids, 2 handkerchiefs, 2 rubber bands, and a source of clean (preferably R/O) water. You’ll have to be more creative with your ingredients. Your need grains, malt, hops, and something for flavor. Simple grains such as those found in common cereals – Raisin Bran, Cracked Wheat, Kashi, whatever you can find – are decent sources of starches and usually contain enough enzymes to break the most complex proteins down. Fruit and nuts will add flavor, but are not important. The grains should be ground as fine as possible, rolled under a rolling pin or crushed in a mortar and pestle. The smaller the grains the greater the reactive surface area.

Nearly two pounds of still-green plant material found in a 2,700-year-old grave in the Gobi Desert has just been identified as the world’s oldest marijuana stash, according to a paper in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Botany. A barrage of tests proves the marijuana possessed potent psychoactive properties and casts doubt on the theory that the ancients only grew the plant for hemp in order to make clothing, rope and other objects. They apparently were getting high too.

Filmmakers, fans, activists, artists, and media makers have been reediting television, movies, and news media for critical and political purposes since almost the very beginning of moving pictures. Over the past century, this subversive form of populist remixing has been called many things, including appropriation art, détournement, media jamming, found footage, avant-garde film, television hacking, telejusting, political remix, scratch video, vidding, outsider art, antiart, and even cultural terrorism. The politically oriented mashup video subgenre has its roots in the rich and diverse history of left-leaning, often deeply antiauthoritarian, creative traditions. These transformative works, by their very nature, are suspicious of and challenge political, corporate, media, and social power structures. They focus on a wide array of issues, including race, gender, sexuality, and economics, in addition to more overtly political topics of government, public policy, and warfare.

A study of nearly 4,000 teenagers published online in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows that secondary school children who take methamphetamine (speed) and MDMA (ecstasy) appear to be prone to depression later on. The study results proved to be independent of previous bouts of depressive symptoms or other drug use. Speed and ecstasy first gained popularity amongst clubbers and people in the rave scene. However, both drugs have also become increasingly popular in the general population, such as secondary school children, who, according to the researchers, often take both drugs at the same time.

Cocaine may speed up the aging of the brain, according to new research that finds that people who are addicted to the drug lose twice the brain volume each year as non-drug users. As the brain ages, it inevitably loses gray matter, the part of brain tissue made up of neuron cell bodies. Loss of gray matter is linked with many of the signs of old age, including memory problems and other declining cognitive abilities, said study researcher Karen Ersche, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge. Middle-age cocaine-dependent people show many of the signs of aging, including cognitive decline, Ersche told LiveScience. To look at the underlying cause, she and her colleagues used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to measure gray matter volume in 60 adults with cocaine dependence and 60 adults without substance-use troubles who were similar to the cocaine-abusing volunteers in age, gender and verbal IQ.

A friend of a man accused of stabbing his mother to death reports the alleged stabber, may have been on a hallucinogenic, called, ‘Psychedelic DMT’. Twenty-two year-old William Walsh remains in jail, charged with stabbing his mother to death at their home over the weekend. DMT is a very expensive illegal drug, hard to find on the streets. “You shouldnt take anything you wont be able to control,” said Brian Chambers with the Memphis Division of the US Drug Enforcement Agency. According to Chambers, Psychedelic DMT is such a powerful drug, it drives people under the influence to do things they wouldn’t normally do. “They start hearing things, they get paranoid, they start seeing things that aren’t there.” expressed Chambers. Powerful, vivid hallucinations aren’t the only side effects. The crystal that’s crushed and then, snorted, smoked or shot up, can cause users to become short of breath, pass out, even die.

A 30-year-old woman who died suddenly in 2010 drank too much Coca-Cola says her partner. Natasha Marie Harris, a mother of eight, died in February 2010 from a cardiac arrest, and her partner Christopher Hodgkinson told an inquest into her death yesterday that she drank at least 10 litres a day, the Otago Daily Times reports. When he found out in 2011 Coke could be the cause, he was irate and made threats to Coca-Cola. Medical records said Ms Harris died of a cardiac arrhythmia, which a doctor in court yesterday said could have been caused by excessive consumption of a sugary drink. Dr Dan Mornin said the consumption can cause severe hypokalemia, a lack of potassium in the blood which could lead to cardiac arrythmias. But Mr Hodgkinson said he had no idea a soft drink like Coca-Cola could kill her at the time. He said she drank it first and last thing each day and throughout the day, and vomited regularly.

Dangerous currents swirl around Sotobanari island, which has not a drop of natural water, and local fishermen rarely land there. But 76-year-old Masafumi Nagasaki has made this kidney-shaped island in Japan’s tropical Okinawa prefecture his retirement home, with an unusual dress code: nothing at all. Naked, he braves lashing typhoons and biting insects as a hermit in the buff. “I don’t do what society tells me, but I do follow the rules of the natural world. You can’t beat nature so you just have to obey it completely,” he said. “That’s what I learned when I came here, and that’s probably why I get by so well.” The wiry Nagasaki, his skin leathered by the sun of two decades on the island, worked briefly as a photographer before spending years on the murkier side of the entertainment industry. When retirement came, he wanted to get far away from it all. He chose Sotobanari, which is roughly a 1,000 meters across and means “Outer Distant island” in the local dialect.

The past few months have seen dozens of students and other protesters charged with major offences – particularly ‘violent disorder’, which carries with it a maximum five-year sentence. Many people, often in their teens and early twenties, have faced crown court trials and been sent to jail for the flimsiest of reasons – throwing a lightweight placard stick, for example – and their lives have been seriously compromised by the stress and humiliation of a trial (many of which take place over a year after the protest) and the shock of prison. At the same time, policing at protests has been heavy-handed, including the use of kettling, horse charges and batons, and police are pushing for ever more resources (water cannon, rubber bullets) to ‘control’ protesters.

The real grotesqueness isn’t in infantry soldiers taking a few war trophies. No, it’s the idea that’s been sold to the American public that war can be sterile. It’s the idea that 18-year-olds who have been ordered to kill people will never play with the body parts afterward. In this sterile world of war – one undoubtedly sold to the American public to ease their comfort with its perpetual existence – missiles are so precise they can avoid collateral damage, drones can narrow in on specific terrorist targets from the sky, and wars need to be neither bought nor paid for. Or something like that. The unfortunate reality is that war is messy. Missiles hit the wrong targets all the time. Drones accidentally kill women and children. And when 18-year-old infantry soldiers get their first confirmed kill, they high-five, cheer and take a photo.

This blog is by no means an advocate for the sale or purchase of illegal drugs. It is meant solely to provide a brief archive of a complex market and product that can often be dangerous. We believe strongly in the philosophy of HARM REDUCTION among recreational drug users and addicts alike. Information and education saves lives. Please be careful, everyone!

Location services company Navizon has a new system, called Navizon I.T.S., that could allow tracking of visitors in malls, museums, offices, factories, secured areas and just about any other indoor space. It could be used to examine patterns of foot traffic in retail spaces, assure that a museum is empty of visitors at closing time, or even to pinpoint the location of any individual registered with the system. But let’s set all that aside for a minute while we freak out about the privacy implications. Most of us leave Wi-Fi on by default, in part because our phones chastise us when we don’t. (Triangulation by Wi-Fi hotspots is important for making location services more accurate.) But you probably didn’t realize that, using proprietary new “nodes” from Navizon, any device with an active Wi-Fi radio can be seen by a system like Navizon’s.

A family outing to an Olive Garden in Indianapolis turned into a brief horror show this week after the restaurant accidentally served their 10-year-old son an alcoholic drink. The boy was taken to the hospital on Thursday. The child–who has not been indenified– had ordered a non-alcoholic Frullato Smoothie, but the waitress mistakenly brought him a 4-ounce cocktail, WISH-TV reported. After realizing the error, the waitress told the restaurant’s management, which informed the boy’s parents. The parents took their son to a local hospital, where tests revealed alcohol in his system. A police officer at the hospital described the boy as “alert” but “shaken up,” according to the local television station.

President Barack Obama is the drug brand of choice for many dealers. Since his election in 2008, the Commander-in-Chief’s name and face has been slapped on a wide variety of contraband products including ecstasy pills, LSD tabs, heroin baggies and a popular strain of medical marijuana.

Sure, it’s not that shocking that a few of these famous writers and actors dropped acid back in the day. But we were surprised to find out how some athletes, scientists and groundbreaking innovators used LSD and how profoundly it affected them personally and professionally. Watch the video about to learn about how some of our most culturally prolific leaders and artists used the psychedelic drug.

This is how I — a journalism graduate student with no background in forensics — became certified as a “Forensic Consultant” by one of the field’s largest professional groups. One afternoon early last year, I punched in my credit card information, paid $495 to the American College of Forensic Examiners International Inc. and registered for an online course. After about 90 minutes of video instruction, I took an exam on the institute’s web site, answering 100multiple choice questions, aided by several ACFEI study packets. As soon as I finished the test, a screen popped up saying that I had passed, earning me an impressive-sounding credential that could help establish my qualifications to be an expert witness in criminal and civil trials. For another $50, ACFEI mailed me a white lab coat after sending my certificate.

✪ A troubling trend in teens drinking hand sanitizer

The liquid hand sanitizer is 62% ethyl alcohol and makes a 120-proof liquid. A few drinks can cause a person’s speech to slur and stomach to burn, and make people so drunk that they have to be monitored in the emergency room. Doctors said this is the latest over-the-counter product that teenagers have adapted for a quick high. Teenagers have done the same with mouthwash, cough syrup and even vanilla extract. “Over the years, they have ingested all sorts of things,” said Helen Arbogast, injury prevention coordinator in the trauma program at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Cough syrup had reached a very sexy point where young people were using it…. We want to be sure this doesn’t take on the same trend.”

The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

Chancellor Katehi, on her part, “thought she made it clear” that when police ordered the students to leave, they were (a) not to wear riot gear into the camp, (b) not to carry weapons of any kind into the camp, (c) were not to use force of any kind against the students, and (d) were not to make any arrests. But all that anybody else on that conference call heard her say out loud was “I don’t want another situation like they just had at Berkeley,” and Chief Spicuzza interpreted that as “no swinging of clubs.” Chief Spicuzza “thought she made it clear” more than once that no riot gear was to be worn and no clubs or pepper sprayers were to be carried. What Lieutenant Pike said back to her, each time, was, “Well, I hear you say that you don’t want us to, but we’re going to.” And they did, including that now-infamous Mk-9 military-grade riot-control pepper sprayer that he used. Oh, funny thing about that particular model of pepper-sprayer? It’s illegal for California cops to possess or use.

“This is the only court in the United States where you can plead guilty and still be given the death penalty, and it’s just another sign that the system is not set up to give anyone a trial it’s set up to give someone what appears to be a fair trial with a predetermined result,” Broyles said.* “It’s pretty clear to me that the public has lost interest in these issues,” Richard Kammen, a death penalty expert representing accused USS Cole attack plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, told TPM. “There’s certainly a lot more interest in Trayvon Martin, for example, than there is in any of the military commissions, with the exception being the arraignment for the 9/11 people. But the day-to-day stuff, which is really quite important, has drifted off peoples’ consciences.” Kammen called the reforms instituted by the Obama administration in 2009 “quite superficial” and said there are “huge, huge problems” in the military commissions system.

Watching pornography would seem to be a vision-intensive task. But new research finds that looking at erotic movies can actually quiet the part of the brain that processes visual stimuli. Most of the time, watching movies or conducting any other visual task sends extra blood flow to this brain region. Not so when the movies are explicit, the researchers found. Instead, the brain seems to shunt blood — and therefore energy — elsewhere, perhaps to regions of the brain responsible for sexual arousal. Turns out, the brain may not need to take in all the visual details of a sex scene, said study researcher Gert Holstege, a uroneurologist at the University of Groningen Medical Center in the Netherlands.

From the archives of British Pathé, a look at Burgess Hill, a one-of-a-kind British boarding school in which nothing was forbidden and students were “allowed to find out for themselves whether conventions are good or bad.” In other words, plenty of cigarette smoking, mod styles, R&B; dancing, abstract painting, and motorbike races. Based on the revolutionary idea that kids should be happy: Burgess Hill was a progressive boarding school in Hertfordshire, England in the 1960s. Run by a Cambridge graduate, it allowed the kids to do what ever they liked! We can’t quite work out whether this is the best or worst school in the world. Would actually be interesting to know what became of these kids.

And it was only when the police came knocking one morning that Jamie’s secret life was exposed. After identifying that someone in the house was accessing child porn, they took Jamie’s laptop away for examination. Jamie is only 13 — and he still hasn’t even kissed a girl, let alone had sex. Though he is only a child himself, the result is that he has been put on the Sex Offender Register, blighting his life for the foreseeable future. Even with intensive therapy, Jamie still suffers from deep shame — ‘as if it is written across my forehead’ — which has led him to fear he will never be able to form a healthy relationship with a woman.

✪ Israel’s top general says Iran unlikely to make bomb

Israel’s military chief said he does not believe Iran will decide to build an atomic bomb and called its leaders “very rational” – comments that clashed with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment. Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz’s remarks, in an interview published on Wednesday in the left-wing Haaretz newspaper, drew little attention in Israel on its annual remembrance day for fallen soldiers, when political discourse is suspended. But they will add fuel to an internal debate on the prospects of Iran weaponizing its uranium enrichment program and the wisdom and risks of any Israeli military strike to try to prevent Tehran from becoming a nuclear power.

In order to gain stronger public perception of new crowd control technology, the US miltary has been showcasing a new weapon dubbed the “pain ray”. The system cost more than $120m developing the technology and was deployed in Afghanistan two years ago

A Bloomington man was attacked and knocked to the ground by a man who wanted to steal his bucket of fried chicken, police said. A 22-year-old man was walking home in the 500 block of South Park Ridge Road just before 1 a.m. Wednesday when he was confronted, police said. Sean M. Nelson, 24, demanded the man give him his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, and began slapping and punching him when he refused, police said. The victim suffered a chipped tooth, red marks on his neck and a torn shirt, police said.

A father has been jailed for setting up a hidden camera in the bathroom where his daughters showered. The Adelaide District Court heard the 50-year-old man had developed an obsession with child pornography which he kept hidden from his family. Police raided his Adelaide home last June and seized more than 2,000 pornographic files from his computer. They also found edited movies of naked teenage girls which had been filmed by a small camera on a storage shelf in the family bathroom. The court heard the youngest daughter could be identified clothed in one of the videos but the naked girls could not be identified. Judge Geoffrey Muecke said the man denied those filmed were his daughters, but said they were of two of his daughter’s friends, aged 14 and 15.

A four-year-old Saudi boy shot his father in the head while playing with his gun at their house, reportedly after his parent refused to buy him a PlayStation video game console. ­After the boy and his father returned home from the shop, the man, in his forties, put down his pistol while taking off his shirt. He did not notice that his son had grabbed his gun and was playing with it before putting his little finger on the trigger. The father died instantly. Some media reports however suggest the death was an accident, although Arabic media has already labeled the boy the youngest killer in Saudi Arabia.

Egyptian husbands will soon be legally allowed to have sex with their dead wives – for up to six hours after their death. The controversial new law is part of a raft of measures being introduced by the Islamist-dominated parliament. It will also see the minimum age of marriage lowered to 14 and the ridding of women’s rights of getting education and employment. Thanks Adam Tetzloff

Sergeant Gary Stein will be kicked out of the Marines for Facebook comments he made criticizing President Obama on a page used by Marine meteorologists. He’ll get an other-than-honorable discharge and lose most of his benefits, three months before his contract would have been completed. “I’m having a hard time seeing how 15 words on Facebook could have ruined my nine-year career,” he said. Stein posted, “Screw Obama and I will not follow all orders from him.” Service members are allowed to criticize political candidates, but not as representatives of the Armed Forces.

Four current and former Transportation Security Administration screeners have been arrested and face charges of taking bribes and looking the other way while suitcases filled with cocaine, methamphetamine or marijuana passed through X-ray machines at Los Angeles International Airport, federal authorities announced Wednesday. The TSA screeners, who were arrested Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, allegedly received up to $2,400 in cash bribes in exchange for allowing large drug shipments to pass through checkpoints in what the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles called a “significant breakdown” of security.

President George Bush, President Barack Obama, and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney all work for the exact same handful of corporate-financier interests. While they vary in how they dress up their methods of carrying out what is essentially a singular agenda, there is glaring continuity from one administration to the next in a process analogous to a corporate spokesman presenting the agenda of the board of directors. Changing spokesmen doesn’t change the agenda of the board of directors. While the corporate media focuses on non-issues, and political pundits accentuate petty political rivalries between the “left” and the “right,” a look deeper into presidential cabinets and the authors of domestic and foreign policy reveals just how accurate this analogy is and who sits on the “board of directors.”

Even by the standards of New Agey, cult-friendly LA, Zeena Schreck had a bizarre and abusive upbringing at the hands of parents who made the devil more famous than he’s ever been. Zeena is the daughter of Church of Satan (CoS) founders Anton LaVey and Diane Hegarty, as well as the recipient of its first baptism. By 13, she had been completely indoctrinated by the CoS, received death threats regularly, and was pregnant. She went on to be ordained the CoS’s high priestess and spokesperson just as Reagan-era yuppies began to completely freak over tales of children being sacrificed in the woods by her congregation. Against all odds, Zeena managed to rebel against the self-absorbed zealots who raised her and left the church in 1990 with her husband, Nikolas Schreck. In 2002, the couple founded the Sethian Liberation Movement, a religious body that allows people to learn and practice magic without answering to an oppressive sect and helps free ex-cult members from their troubled pasts.

Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again. With that ice melting at an alarming rate, those conditions could soon be at hand. Masses of bacteria and other microbes – some of which the world hasn’t seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change about 750,000 years ago – will make their way back into the environment. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life. Altogether, the biomass of microbial cells in and beneath the ice sheet may amount to more than 1,000 times that of all the humans on Earth.

But I’m wondering if focusing on the ew-gross aspects of “lean, finely textured beef” (as the industry calls it) doesn’t miss the bigger picture, which is that the meat industry’s very business model is deeply gross. Even if pink slime is purged from the face of the earth, the system that produces our meat and related products (eggs, milk) won’t be fundamentally changed. A while back, I identified something about meat production that’s “even grosser than pink slime”—proposed new rules that would privatize inspection at poultry slaughterhouses while dramatically speeding up kill lines. Here are four more.

‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star. What is it?’ asked the site. UFO fans on YouTube have been highly enthusiastic about the object, with many claiming it as a definite ‘spot’. SOHO, the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory, is a satellite built to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.

UFO Near The Sun

The U.S. Senate has passed a bill that would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to include black box data recorders from the year 2015, and would (among many other provisions) permit the IRS to confiscate one’s passport on the suspicion of owing taxes. SB 1813, called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP 21), passed in the Senate quite easily after heavy promotion from Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif., left). The bill is scheduled for a vote in the House, where Republicans are hoping to add a Keystone XL Pipeline provision before passage.

The discovery of what Chechen scientists believe to be dinosaur eggs is causing a ruckus among paleontologists. The sphere-like fossils were found on a construction site and the area has become a magnet for locals eager to look at the ‘dinos’. Workmen building a new road were blacking through a hillside near the Chechen border with Georgia when they came across what geologists described as a clutch of 60 million year old “eggs”.

But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops. There has been a significant increase in the use of stimulant medication. Documents that I obtained in late 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act, and have recently analyzed, show that annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 — more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.

Shakespeare said, “a rose by another other name would smell as sweet.” The residents in a small village in Austria with the unfortunate name of Fucking think a place that’s called any other other name would get less offensive treatment. Moves are now afoot to change the village name to something less distinctive. “The only problem is that we need all of the Fucking residents to agree to the name change,” Mayor Franz Meindl said –speaking literally, you can assume, and not colloquially, in a recent TV interview. “Everyone needs to agree for it to happen.”

✪ Penis removal not needed for man to become woman: Ontario tribunal

Under current law, even if a man transitioning to a woman had undergone hormone therapy, grown a pair of breasts and developed a higher-pitched voice, they are barred from changing their sex without written proof of a vagina. “Even though you could be presenting as a female full-time, you couldn’t get your birth certificate changed to show you as female unless you had the male bits lopped off,” said Kay Lockhart, a woman-in-transition based in Ottawa.

“I found 11 films showing my wife in indecent scenes with her lover….it was the first time I watched a porno film and I did this just out of curiosity,” Ramadan told Egyptian newspapers at his house in the northeastern province of Dakhalia. “She first denied it and accused me of being insane before I faced her with the films…she then confessed to be still in love with her boyfriend, saying he is as young as her and that I am an old man.” Ramadan said he had been happy during his marriage life until he logged on to that website. Newspapers did not say whether he decided to divorce her.

Plenty of cop “beat downs” can be found online, but how often does the officer who stops others from handing out the beating get fired for it? That’s exactly what’s happening to Officer Regina Tasca in the Bogota Police Department. Tasca’s dashboard camera captured her as she attempted to stop two officers from beating an emotionally disturbed young man. Just days after the incident, she was told she was being suspended with pay. A year later, her trial is about to begin as the Bogota PD seeks to fire her.

Here’s a simple math equation: T-shirts + abortion = controversy. Tensions ran high on Monday, after T-shirts reading “I had an abortion” were sold on the University of North Carolina Wilmington campus, WECT reports . The shirts were on sale as part of a book signing and discussion lead by abortion rights advocate, Jennifer Baumgardner. The shirts are meant to help destigmatize abortion and help people talk about their experience, according to WWAY. A few students protested the shirts by wearing some of their own that said, “I haven’t killed a baby.”

Students as young as 11 years old would be tested for use of marijuana, pills, cocaine and heroin under a proposal by a North Port charter school that wants to institute the region’s most aggressive student testing program.

“A host of previous studies have routinely shown that individuals with body piercings or tattoos are more likely to engage in risky behavior than non-pierced or non-tattooed people,” corresponding author Nicolas Gueguen, a professor of social behavior at the University of Southern Brittany, said in a journal news release. These risky behaviors include unprotected sex, fighting, theft and drinking. Educators, parents and doctors should consider tattoos and piercings as potential signs of drinking and use them to begin a conversation about alcohol use and other risky behaviors, Gueguen suggested.

Though a variety of companies today serve alcohol to employees, it’s still ad agencies who hold highest the gin-soaked torch. The ranks of liquor-serving firms have recently included J. Walter Thompson, BBDO, TBWA/Chiat/Day, Grey, and Mindshare. In New York, J. Walter Thompson has in its offices a 50-foot-long bar with pedestal stools that would put many a commercial bar to shame. “Yes, we have a bar,” says a spokesperson, “and it is frequently accessed. We think it incentivizes and enthuses employees. It’s generally used for off-hours consumption, but that’s not to say there isn’t on-hours consumption as well.”

Infographic

In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.” The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Times article, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said.

The former heavyweight champion said that back in 2009 he was in a hotel room with seven prostitutes, a morphine drip in his arm, a pile of cocaine and a bottle of cognac when he began to feel paranoid. Convinced the women were trying to steal from him he started beating them up and threw them out – to stop them from ‘taking his soul’. Tyson said: ‘That’s when I realised it wasn’t just demons – it was the devil himself. ‘It was the lowest point of a very low life, but it was my own knockout punch to clean up life, get whole, get well – and I haven’t done anything in three years now.

The agencies launched an investigation earlier this month when a shipment from Brazil was intercepted at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. The packages, which police report were destined for Richardson’s apartment in Picton, contained drugs known as dimethyltryptamine, a hallucinogen more commonly referred to as DMT, which is a natural compound found in many plants and shrubs. Prince Edward OPP officers assisted with a search warrant at Richardson’s apartment and seized an additional 40 kilograms of the drug. Combined with the packages seized at the airport, police confiscated a total of 120 kgs. Of the illegal drug. This translates to an estimated street value of $68,750 and equals approximately 13,750 hits of the drug, police report.

✪ Tazered man high on LSD dies in police custody, family seeks answers

However, his friend Amanda Nazarao said she and Salgado were on LSD when police responded to a West Miami neighborhood, early Friday morning. Salgado was reportedly naked and behaving in a strange manner. When police arrived at the scene, they Tasered the 21-year-old and restrained him. “They had no reason to beat him, they had no reason to Taser him. He was naked, he had no weapon on him, he wasn’t a threat to them,” Nazarao said. Miami-Dade Police released the following statement: “Upon the officers’ arrival, the male who was later identified as George Salgado became aggressive and violent towards the officers and they utilized their electronic control device.” The 21-year-old was transported to Larkin Hospital, where he later died. Nazarao said, “He looked over. He was like, ‘I just want to tell you guys that I love you all,’ and that’s the last thing he said.”

On a night the team curtailed beer sales in the upper deck, the Blue Jays also ejected a spectator dressed as a marijuana leaf.

When more than 400 25-years-old adults were interviewed, some showed signs of alcohol use problems, but their problems didn’t correlate to self-reported feelings of immaturity. When surveyed again four years later at age 29 and then again at age 35, subjects expressed different sentiments: individuals who showed signs of alcohol abuse or dependence also self-reported feeling immature for their age. “We interpreted our findings to suggest that, at 25, drinking is more culturally acceptable,” Winograd said. “Young adults are out at the bars with their friends and drinking is a bonding experience. They also view blacking out, vomiting and drunk driving as more acceptable because peers are behaving similarly. “But by 29, when many of their peers have settled down, individuals who still drink heavily may start to view themselves as ‘Peter Pans’ of partying, who never fully matured,” Winograd said.

Federal authorities have arrested eight men accused of distributing more than $1 million worth of LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics with an online storefront that used the TOR anonymity service to mask their Internet addresses. “The Farmer’s Market,” as the online store was called, was like an Amazon for consumers of controlled substances, according to a 66-page indictment unsealed on Monday. It offered online forums, Web-based order forms, customer service, and at least four methods of payment, including PayPal and Western Union. From January 2007 to October 2009, it processed some 5,256 orders valued at $1.04 million. The site catered to about 3,000 customers in 35 countries, including the United States.

D.H. Peligro may hail from the wrong side of the segregated St. Louis tracks but after becoming the drummer of the Dead Kennedys and making his way into the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he has seen much of the world—including the dark side of addiction. Two years after a nasty relapse, Peligro is back with a new band (catch them at the Viper Room this Sunday night). He’s also now ready to tell the world what it’s like to be punk, black, and trying to hide a drug habit from Anthony Kiedis.

A smart-mouthed junkie/loser known as J.J. (George Segal) spends his days looking for just “one more fix”.

The woman was married to defendant Robert McClain, a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, at the time of the vicious attack, and pretended to castrate her 23-year-old boyfriend as the husband watched, prosecutors previously said. Through tears, the woman told jurors that she pleaded with her jealous husband to stop his violent two-hour rampage in September 2008 for the sake of his career and their children, the Orange County Register reported. McClain didn’t listen, she reportedly testified, and instead beat her boyfriend to the point of brain damage and slashed his body with a knife. The unidentified woman said her enraged hubby tried to have sex with her, ordered her to have sex with the badly injured boyfriend and demanded the castration as a sick form of retribution.

In the UK in the 1960s an attempt was made to reduce fly posting (the illegal pasting up of posters). Warning notices were put up with the legend ‘Bill Stickers Will Be Prosecuted’. Waggish fly posters responded with ‘Bill Stickers is Innocent’ notices. The joke wasn’t new in the 1960s though. In a New York newspaper The Olean Herald, 1884, there’s a piece reprinted from the London Graphic: “A countryman named William Stickers, flying to London to escape from rural justice, was appalled at reading on a wall: ‘Bill Stickers Beware!’ He went a little further, but reading again, ‘Bill Stickers will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law,’ gave himself up for lost and surrendered.”

A five-story-tall cylindrical metal tank, 90 feet in diamater had burst. A two-story-tall wave containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses issued forth, traveling out in all directions like a shock-wave. The molasses spread across the city at an estimated 35 miles per hour. And it wasn’t just the sugary tidal wave that was so deadly; the tank ripped into sharp projectiles, and shot metal bolts from its sides like bullets. As the wave and debris crashed down Commercial Street, buildings were smashed to bits. Some were picked up by their foundations and floated away in the tide of molasses. Electrical poles keeled over, exposing live wires. A steel elevated train support beam was torn to smithereens. Molasses covered everything. According to a Boston Post article, “Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper.” It wasn’t just horses. The great Boston molasses flood killed 21 people.

A 10-year-old girl from Colombia gave birth to a baby girl via cesarean section, Univision’s Primer Impacto, reported. The girl hails from an indigenous tribe in the town of Manaure, a town in the Colombian Department of La Guajira.

Reginald Gill, 77, conned women into believing they had cancer and told one victim she could be cured if a man sucked her breasts. Thanks Jasmine

The trio allegedly forged a sect called Cartel who wanted to purify the world and reduce the population according to police spokesman Democrito Honorato, from the Brazilian town of Guaranhuns. They were identified as Jorge Beltrao Negromonte and Elizabeth Pires da Silveira, both 51, and Bruna da Silva. Police allege they intended to kill three women per year. Once at their home, it is thought that the women were killed and their “meat” was cooked and used as the filling in a pastry dish known as empanada, which was then sold to unwitting neighbours.

The Rape-aXe system consists of a latex sheath, which contains razor-sharp barbs. The device is worn in her vagina like a tampon. When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest

A Recording Chronology Of The Early Days Of Psychedelic Culture This is an attempt to chronicle all relevant recording events during the early years in which psychedelic culture and pop/rock culture coalesced. The timeline does not deal with events outside rock music, and contains no entries related to jazz, avantgarde, exotica, etc. It is subjective to a certain degree, and some borderline entries that are not necessarily “psychedelic” have been included just the same. The dates have been verified against quality sources as far as possible. Prior to the 1965-66 era, a selection of important items have been included.

NSFW Ketchup performance art

✪ Slayer Reign in Blood Red Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage: 2010

As much as you love your Hell Awaits and Reign In Blood, you have now found a wine to match the music. Slayer one of the hardest thrash metal bands ever and pioneers in their genre, have chosen Sweden as the launch market for their first beverage, Slayer Reign in Blood Red! The wine, a Cabernet Sauvignon from California, is as uncomprimising and tough as the band. After a couple of Seasons in the Abyss, the wine has an undisputed attitude and a soft nose of dark berry fruits with oak and spicy nuances. Good mouth feel with hints of fresh fruit and juicy, smooth tannins. Well structured and rounded with subtle notes of oak, showing true Divine Intervention. Best company for the wine comes as no surprise, enjoy it while headbanging, riffing or with food, friends and great music. Reign in Wine!

There are lots of thieves in China, and they are all very brave! In the following, we will have two videos to show you how those professional thieves using a pair of chopsticks to steal people’s mobile phone

For a reason or reasons unknown, but possibly explained by the lighter and what may or may not be a baggie of contraband on his lap, 21-year-old Steven Mulhall stole Judge Michael Orlando’s nameplate from the door of the judge’s courtroom in Broward County, Florida. At some point thereafter, Mulhall posed for this picture with his prize, and his girlfriend appears to have posted it on Facebook. (They are only the latest in a growing horde of people who don’t seem to understand that by posting things on the “Internet,” you make them “public,” thus creating potentially incriminating “evidence.”) A tipster told police about the photo and gave them Mulhall’s name and address.

Police arrested 52-year-old Dr. Anthony Monteleone on Wednesday in the back parking lot of his office. They say he was caught snorting lines of suspected cocaine and then going inside Katsur Dental and Orthodontics in Edgewood to treat his patients. Undercover agents grabbed Monteleone after they witnessed him using what appeared to be cocaine. “There was a police officer observing what appeared to be drug use,” Edgewood Police Chief Robert Payne said. “It was outside the car.” Chief Payne, who made the arrest, asked Dr. Monteleone if he had a problem. The doctor, according to the criminal complaint, admitted to using marijuana, Xanax and cocaine.

The art world’s most intriguingly anonymous character, Banksy, is known for appropriating all sorts of outdoor and arguably “public” spaces. Who else does that? The advertising industry of course. I think one has to agree with his sentiments, albeit with a wry smile given his own predilection for placing his art in places our eyeballs can’t avoid. Here’s his statement

The Hopkins group that Johnson is part of has been investigating the use of psilocybin, the hallucinogen in “magic mushrooms,” for smoking cessation and to help terminal cancer patients cope with their illness. They’ve also taken a look at Salvinorin A, a hallucinogen in salvia, too. Why would hallucinogens be suited for these kinds of treatments? Johnson said people taking the drugs in the studies he’s helped with report that it is “one of the most meaningful experiences — or the most meaningful — in their life.” Some says the “trip” changes the direction of their lives and can trigger a redefinition of how they see themselves. That could be as profound as, “I’m now a nondrinker, or whatever the adciction may be,” he said.

✖ The Language of Persuasion – Government Or Regime?

“Police are warning that when cannabis plants reach the final stages of maturity the odour they release has carcinogenic properties. “Officers who deal with the plants use ventilation masks and protective suits and people who have plants in their home, especially anyone with young children, may be exposing their family to a health risk.”

✖ From Road Salt to Pink Goo, What’s In the Food?

In the modern-day world in which we live you never really know to what extent the corrupt globalists will go to profiteer from adding deadly poisons, toxins, drugs, and chemicals to our food and water supply. Not only do we have to pay attention as consumers to fluoride levels in our drinking water, now we must watch for a whole slew of toxic and gruesome additives in the foods we eat.

Neil Hope grew up in the 1980s before an audience of millions as a star in a pair of gritty Canadian television dramas, “Degrassi Junior High” and its sequel, “Degrassi High.” The shows were cultural touchstones in Canada and cult favorites in the United States, where they anticipated teenage docudramas like MTV’s “Real World” and soaps like “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

The researchers found that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates. The brains of honeybees that were more likely than others to seek adventure exhibited distinct patterns of gene activity in molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans. The findings present a new perspective on honeybee communities, which were thought to be highly regimented and comprised of a colony of interchangeable workers taking on a few specific roles to serve their queen. It now seems as though individual honeybees differ in their desire to perform particular tasks and these differences could be down to variability in bees’ personalities. This supports a 2011 study at Newcastle University that suggested that honeybees exhibit pessimism, suggesting that insects might have feelings.

Being a Nazi, this public servant obviously didn’t miss an opportunity to couch as many of these regulations as he could in racist or anti-Semitic terms. Such, after all, are the National Socialist equivalent of soothing conventional wisdom. But that’s just it: If you’re a Nazi, and you can pass something you don’t like off as a “Negroid excess,” or a manifestation of “Jewish Fremason-ry,” it helps you with the kind of Nazi cred you need insulate yourself from having to justify what’s wrong with the music as music. More than that, it helps you hide your fear of the deeper resonance the music has with people as people. In an interview given in Prague in 1968, relayed in Talkin’ Moscow Blues, Skvorecky noted that “jazz is, above all, a kind of fraternity.” That’s not an entirely obvious thought if you come from the same part of the world jazz itself does.

Keeping the artificial intelligence genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity’s problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. But successful containment requires careful planning so that a clever breed of artificial intelligence cannot simply threaten, bribe, seduce or hack its way to freedom. “It can discover new attack pathways, launch sophisticated social-engineering attacks and re-use existing hardware components in unforeseen ways,” Yampolskiy said. “Such software is not limited to infecting computers and networks — it can also attack human psyches, bribe, blackmail and brainwash those who come in contact with it.”

The TSA is clearly no fan of the 4th Amendment, nor of 5th Amendment due process rights, and now this blatant attempt to manipulate the free press with “strong caution” hits at Amendment the First. Why strong caution? Are there repercussions for journalists that fail to heed this “advice?” Because, you know, if I were a member of the free press and the federal government asked me to censor myself, I’d happily comply . . . . . . . . . riiight. I have news for the federal government: Americans will not take censorship in any form. We thought we made this clear when you tried to force SOPA on us.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Setting your Facebook page to “friends only” and your Twitter feed to private is a good idea, especially if you’re hunting for a job or trying to get into the college of your choice. You want to be selective in the details you reveal about yourself and, quite frankly, what you post on a social network is none of their damned business. But it appears even that may not be enough to protect you any more. Bob Sullivan of MSNBC reports that some state agencies and colleges are forcing prospective employees and students to grant them full access to their social networks.

✖ Kony 2012 Hoax Exposed

Kony 2012 is but another piece of slick propaganda designed to tug on the heart strings – and the purse strings – of ignorant Americans who are clueless about the real reasons why the globalists are now moving into Africa in a big way. Invisible Children’s connections to USAID and thus the CIA should put the effort in context. Africa is one of several targets prized by the globalists as they move to grab vital natural resources, consolidate power and unleash their monetary enslavement and world totalitarian government end game around the globe.

Today is an incredibly sad day for fans of comic books, concept art, and downright anything science fiction. Artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, who provided some of the most stunning scifi and fantasy art ever to grace a page, has succumbed to illness at the age of 73. It’s pretty hard to overstate the hand Moebius had in some of science fiction’s most phantasmagoric cinema. You know his work even if you’ve never realized it. In addition to providing preliminary designs for such films as Alien, Tron, The Abyss, Masters of the Universe, The Fifth Element, and Willow (which were awesome albeit unused), the artist provided concept art for El Topo director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-realized Dune adaptation, which was to star Mick Jagger and boast a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.

In the New Yorker article, Jane Mayer quotes you as saying, “I actually had hopes for Obama.” What’s your opinion on the Obama administration’s stated support for whistle-blowers and, more generally, his counterterrorism record? Worse than Bush. I have to say that. I actually voted for Obama. It’s all rhetoric for me now. As Americans we were hoodwinked. He’s expanding the secrecy regime far beyond what the Bush even intended, interestingly enough. I think Bush is probably like, “Whoa.”

In October, Mother Jones revealed that the FBI is notorious for creating supposed terrorist groups from scratch and then framing patsies in order to claim the government is protecting the United States from terrorists and also breathe life into an otherwise moribund war on mostly nonexistent terrorism. Sabu’s role as an FBI provocateur working inside LulzSec reveals the government is attempting to do the same in order to push its so-called cybersecurity agenda. The establishment is eager to pass a raft of legislation to closely regulate the internet, strip the medium of its anonymity, and close it down as an activism and alternative media tool.

That is what the census says. Andrew Leonard in Salon notes that it is a bit misleading, that “4.7 million are for “seasonal use” only, the Census tells us — unoccupied vacation homes, in other words. 4.1 million are for rent, 2.3 million are for sale, and the remaining 7.5 million “were vacant for a variety of other reasons.” The census also lists the total number of homeless in America as 759,101, so there are 24 empty houses for every homeless person in America. What a shocking misallocation of resources, materials and energy.

Gerald Zirnstein grinds his own hamburger these days. Why? Because this former United States Department of Agriculture scientist and, now, whistleblower, knows that 70 percent of the ground beef we buy at the supermarket contains something he calls “pink slime.” “Pink slime” is beef trimmings. Once only used in dog food and cooking oil, the trimmings are now sprayed with ammonia so they are safe to eat and added to most ground beef as a cheaper filler. It was Zirnstein who, in an USDA memo, first coined the term “pink slime” and is now coming forward to say he won’t buy it. “It’s economic fraud,” he told ABC News. “It’s not fresh ground beef. … It’s a cheap substitute being added in.”

This video is here to demonstrate that the TSA’s insistence that the nude body scanner program is effective and necessary is nothing but a fraud, just like their claims that the program is safe (radiation what?) and non-invasive (nude pictures who?). The scanners are now effectively worthless, as anyone can beat them with virtually no effort. The TSA has been provided this video in advance of it being made public to give them an opportunity to turn off the scanners and revert to the metal detectors. I personally believe they now have no choice but to turn them off.

Planned Parenthood exposes children to sexual material in order to seed a generation of sex addicts, who will become future customers for the abortion giant. This report exposes Planned Parenthood’s sex-education programs, using images from Planned Parenthood’s own websites, social networks, and events.

The secret’s out: Men are wearing tights. Pantyhose for men, or “mantyhose,” have been popular throughout Europe for years and now the trend – even outside the ballet barre – has crept stateside.

Today’s leading cola beverages contain high levels of a substance linked to cancer in animals, according to new research. An independent study commissioned by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) uncovered 4-methylimidazole, or 4-MI, in Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi and Diet Pepsi at levels 4.8 times greater than those allowed in beverages in California. 4-MI is a byproduct of the reaction that produces the caramel coloring in brown sodas. The chemical has been found to be carcinogenic in animal studies. The state of California has banned 4-MI in any amount that could potentially lead to one cancer case in 100,000 people. However the levels found in these 4 leading Cola brands indicated a lifetime risk of 5 cancers out of 100,000, assuming that people drink one soft drink per day. That risk rises to 10 cancers out of 100,000 people who drink only soft drinks containing caramel coloring.

Anderson Cooper attempted, and miserably failed, to mitigate the damage from the discovery that one of the poster boys for foreign intervention in Syria was manufacturing complete propaganda for Western consumption. The video below is the original video exposing “Danny” as a vicious propagandist actively working against the interests of the Syrian people. This is just more exploitation of the good intentions of people around the world for nefarious ends. These revelations further damage the credibility of the already highly untrustworthy Syrian rebels, much like the Libyan rebels delegitimized themselves. Stay weary of the effort to push us into military intervention in Syria and question all sources of information and the “statistics” we are fed by the Western establishment media. Keep in mind none of this is confirmed, the sources have a political interest in disseminating disinformation and so do those who report the claims made by so-called activists as gospel.

Two Cambridge graduates have thought of a clever way of making enough money to pay the debts they built up attending university. Facing a combined bill of £50,000 ($80,000), Ed Moyse and Ross Harper started a business called Buy My Face. The product: advertising space on their faces. The pair started by selling the space to family and friends for just £1-per-day, but the price is now up to £400-per-day.they even have a sponsor in Ernst & Young. They started the business last October and it appears to still be going strong.

A dozen earthquakes in northeastern Ohio were almost certainly induced by injection of gas-drilling wastewater into the earth, Ohio oil and gas regulators said Friday as they announced a series of tough new regulations for drillers.

The HIV rate among black women living in some U.S. cities is the same rate as that of some African countries, according to a new multicenter study presented Thursday at the 19th Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. The jarring findings acknowledge that HIV is not an infection that has been eradicated, but one that has been somewhat forgotten, researchers said. The new data come from the ISIS study (The Women’s HIV Seroincidence Study), and reflect an analysis of at-risk women in six urban areas of the United States that have some of the highest rates of HIV/AIDS: Baltimore, Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., Washington, D.C., Newark and New York City. “This disease is alive and well in this country,” said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, principal investigator for the Atlanta area of the study and professor of medicine and infectious disease at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “But this epidemic is the face of the forgotten people.”

A new condom that aims to enhance erections may also lift earnings and buyout prospects for unprofitable U.K. drugmaker Futura Medical Plc. Durex condoms made by partner Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc will contain a dose of Futura’s Zanifil gel inside the tip, boosting blood flow within the penis. The product results in firmer, larger and longer-lasting erections for men who may find wearing condoms challenging, according to Futura.

Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova are accused of hooliganism over the incident last month in which four members of the group cavorted and shouted a song protesting against the rule of Vladimir Putin in front of the iconostasis of the Christ the Saviour Cathedral. Mr Putin’s spokesman has described the performance as “disgusting” and said the prime minister and president-elect regarded it “negatively”. The two young women were arrested the night before Mr Putin won a third term in the Kremlin on Sunday, and have been remanded in custody until a trial next month. Pussy Riot formed in October last year and has focused on guerrilla activism against Putin, including an impromptu concert on Red Square. Its members use pseudonyms and wear brightly-coloured balaclavas and clothes for performances and interviews.

Rumors started among students, and then instructors, about the teacher’s alter persona before it came to the attention of Haydock Intermediate School officials. The district superintendent told KCAL9 that the videos do not involve any Oxnard school district students. According to a written notice sent to parents Tuesday, the school says the teacher does not face any criminal charges but has been placed on administrative leave: Oxnard Middle School Teacher Pulled From Classroom Amid Rumors Shes Working As Hard Core Porn Actress (credit: CBS) “It has been alleged that one of our teachers is depicted in at least one pornographic video and possibly others on the internet…These sites contain extremely graphic and inappropriate pornographic material.”The notice also warns parents to keep students away from social media sites, inappropriate outside networks and smartphones. The 30-year-old instructor’s identity has been withheld while the allegations are being investigated.

The issue that should have sparked panic in the survey is the total consensus among Israeli Jews – regardless of religious, ethnic or political differences – that the “guiding principle” for the country and for Judaism itself is “to remember the Holocaust.” Ninety-eight percent of the respondents consider it either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.

Students were told they were taking part in a study of how funds should be distributed in college – and offered a range of ethnic-based groups to share money between. After listening to Bruce Springsteen and the White Stripes, the students handed most of the money to white people. ‘Rock music is generally associated with white Americans, so we believe it cues white listeners to think about their positive association with their own in-group,’ said Heather LaMarre, an assistant professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota. ‘That was enough for them to show more support for a student group representing mostly whites.’ After listening to Top 40 pop such as Gwen Stefani, Akon and Fergie, the students divided money more equally between white people, black people and latinos.

A commonly prescribed drug used to treat high blood pressure may have the unintended benefit of muting racist thoughts in those who take it. A new Oxford University research study found that Propranolol, which works to combat high blood pressure, anxiety, migraines, and a number of heart ailments, affects the same part of the central nervous system that regulates subconscious attitudes on race.

✖ Pat Robertson: Pot should be legal like alcohol

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson says marijuana should be legalized and treated like alcohol because the government’s war on drugs has failed. The outspoken evangelical Christian and host of “The 700 Club” on the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network he founded said the war on drugs is costing taxpayers billions of dollars. He said people should not be sent to prison for marijuana possession. The 81-year-old first became a self-proclaimed “hero of the hippie culture” in 2010 when he called for ending mandatory prison sentences for marijuana possession convictions.

They call him “Twenty-Four.” Yoandri Hernandez Garrido’s nickname comes from the six perfectly formed fingers on each of his hands and the six impeccable toes on each foot. Hernandez is proud of his extra digits and calls them a blessing, saying they set him apart and enable him to make a living by scrambling up palm trees to cut coconuts and posing for photographs in this eastern Cuban city popular with tourists. One traveler paid $10 for a picture with him, Hernandez said, a bonanza in a country with an average salary of just $20 a month. “It’s thanks to my 24 digits that I’m able to make a living, because I have no fixed job,” Hernandez said.

✖ Celebrities with STDs – Famous People with STDs – STIs – VD

Famous Celebrities with Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) Welcome to the celebrities section of the STD Carrier Registry. Here you can browse our list of idolized (and not so idolized) people from Hollywood, professional sports, pornography, politics, literary writing, activism, and other notable segments of society. All celebs on the list correspond to detailed profiles containing pictures, some videos, and references to news reports.

Love is supposed to be everlasting. Unfortunately for many, the only permanent thing to come out of a relationship is an incurable sexually transmitted disease. And that’s why Cyrus Sullivan, of Portland, Ore., claims that he runs STD Carriers Disease Control and Prevention Services, a website that lists claimed and confirmed carriers by their names, locations, descriptions, and sometimes their photos. The database is completely open to the public — you don’t have to login to browse the listings, and many of the recently added carriers’ pics are displayed prominently on the site’s front page. Users submit photos freely. There are about 1,500 listings.

Watch out Facebook and Foursquare: there’s a new site that allows users to “check-in” when they are having, uh… protected sex! There’s a new batch of condoms with wrappers equipped with a QR code – a scannable barcode – giving users the ability to “check-in” when they use the contraceptive, according to Planned Parenthood. After scanning the QR code, users check in on wheredidyouwearit.com. The website displays an interactive map showing where users have checked in at. Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest (PPGNW) released 55,000 condoms to colleges and universities in Washington state in honor of National Condom Week, which was Feb. 14 to Feb. 21.

It shows a couple of fights, one between two women just outside the mall that was broken up by a mall security guard and another inside the mall between what appears to be young males. In one scene, a man is knocked to the mall floor and appears unconscious. Other males can be seen running. After the incident, stores were briefly on lockdown and the video shows frightened shoppers trying to exit the mall. In December, police said they arrested three people in connection with the fights.

Lafayette said she was inside her home taking a nap on Saturday when someone knocked on her door. When she stepped outside, several Newton County deputies were in her yard. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, don’t tell me that the dogs got out,'” she said. She was worried her dogs got out and attacked someone. “A deputy told me I didn’t do anything wrong, I was the victim. I said, ‘Victim!’ I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, did someone kill my dog?’ He said, ‘No the neighbor behind you, they saw the teenager having sex with your female dogs.’ I said, ‘Having sex with my female dogs?’ I think they must have got it wrong,” said Lafayette. Lafayette didn’t believe them until they showed her the video her neighbors recorded. “And it showed him on his knees inside the kennel with my dog. He was on his knees like he was a dog,” said Lafayette. Police arrested 19-year old Bernard Archer and charged him with two counts of bestiality

Three male teachers at a US high school have been arrested and charged on suspicion of child seduction after admitted to passing around a 16-year-old student. Officials were called in after the male student revealed on 18 January the school band director, a swimming coach and a substitute Spanish teacher all engaged in physical relationships with him several times on school grounds. The boy, who cannot be name for legal reasons, claimed that many of the alleged acts, which range from touching and kissing to having sex in a car, took place on the grounds of North Putnam High School in Roachdale, central Indiana. According to Indiana state police, those arrested and charged were: substitute Spanish teacher Nicholas Vester, 24, who worked at the school for 12 weeks last autumn; band director Craig Rogers, 24, currently on paid leave; and volunteer swimming coach Brandon Largent, 20, a student at Ivy Tech community college.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern – in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria. A woman tending to her husband in the middle of the night by Jan Saenredam, 1595 Roger Ekirch says this 1595 engraving by Jan Saenredam is evidence of activity at night Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

✖ The Internet Blames Obama for the Death of Andrew Breitbart

Before 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, The New York Times’ assistant managing editor, Jim Roberts, tweeted what was perhaps the first accusation that hinted at Barack Obama’s involvement. “Only a few weeks ago, #Breitbart spoke to CPAC, claiming to have videos of Obama from ‘college days,’” wrote Roberts. Sure enough, only weeks earlier Breibart, never one to hold back against the president, told an audience at the Washington, DC Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that he was close to leaking videos that would end the political career of the commander-in-chief. “I have videos, this election we’re going to vet him,” Breitbart told an audience of attendees last month. “We are going to vet him from his college days to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what hope and change was sold in 2008.”

Psychedelic substances have long been used for healing, ceremonial, or mind-altering subjective experiences due to compounds that, when ingested or inhaled, generate hallucinations, perceptual distortions, or altered states of awareness. Of these, the psychedelic substance psilocybin, the prodrug (a precursor of a drug that must in vivo chemical conversion by metabolic processes before becoming an active pharmacological agent) of psilocin (4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine) and the key hallucinogen found in so-called magic mushrooms, is widely used not only in healing ceremonies, but, more recently, in psychotherapy as well – but little has been known about its specific activity in the brain.

State representatives on Friday advanced legislation to launch a study into what Wyoming should do in the event of a complete economic or political collapse in the United States. House Bill 85 passed on first reading by a voice vote. It would create a state-run government continuity task force, which would study and prepare Wyoming for potential catastrophes, from disruptions in food and energy supplies to a complete meltdown of the federal government. The task force would look at the feasibility of Wyoming issuing its own alternative currency, if needed. And House members approved an amendment Friday by state Rep. Kermit Brown, R-Laramie, to have the task force also examine conditions under which Wyoming would need to implement its own military draft, raise a standing army, and acquire strike aircraft and an aircraft carrier.

✖ ‘Plume-Gate’ Shocker: Media Silence Raises Troubling Questions

The executive branch and multiple federal agencies, agencies tasked with keeping the American public safe, did their best to hide and to cover-up information about a deadly radioactive plume and ensuing fallout that was headed for the West Coast of the United States from Japan. The fact it was real and did arrive is proven by samplings from milk, vegetables and rainwater. Even though EPA testing methodology and actual capability were questioned, independent sources verified the fallout. To those who say radiation does not travel in a plume or that fallout is a local phenomenon, there is an excellent distillation of the book ‘Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment’ at GlobalResearch.ca that proves otherwise. The evidence obtained in the FOIA request indicates that right from the start, the NRC had a clear idea of the significance of the disaster that was unfolding, but concealed the truth from the American public.

Last month TfL applied to issue anti-social behaviour orders which would not only stop them undertaking further expeditions and blogging about urban exploration but also prohibit them from carrying equipment that could be used for exploring after dark. Extraordinarily, it also stipulates they should not be allowed to speak to each other for the duration of the order – 10 years. “To me, telling people they can’t associate with their closest friends is an incredible invasion of human rights,” says Garrett. “It’s a complete overreaction and an amazing tack to take after the group already agreed to a caution.” He thinks TfL’s legal action is fuelled by a wider misunderstanding of what urban exploration is about. “What we do is very benign,” he says. “The motivation for it comes from a love for the city – we want to interact with its hidden histories and forgotten stories and places.”

At 20.6 millimetres long, the 165-million-year old fossils dwarf the largest living flea – a 12 mm species which plagues the mountain beaver of North America. The fossil beasts are so large they may have lived on feathered dinosaurs rather than the small mammals that scuttled across the Mesozoic landscape, according to André Nel at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France, a member of the team that made the find

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

A Philadelphia woman was arrested Wednesday at a so-called “pumping party,” where police say she was planning to administer buttock-enhancing injections. Police say they received a tip that Padge Windslowe, also known as “Black Madam,” would be performing the procedure at a Germantown home. This wasn’t the first time the “Black Madam” was connected to illegal buttock enhancements. Windslowe is under investigation for a botched butt-enhancement procedure on 20-year-old British student Claudia Aderotimi at the Hampton Inn near Philadelphia International Airport in February 2011, according to police. Aderotimi died after the procedure was performed.

Ronald Reagan once famously declared that inflation is a tax, but sadly most Americans did not really grasp what he was talking about. If the American people truly understood what inflation was doing to them, they would be screaming bloody murder about monetary policy. Inflation is an especially insidious tax because it is not just a tax on your income for one year. It is a continual tax on every single dollar that you own. As your money sits in the bank, it is constantly losing value. Over time, the effects of inflation can be absolutely devastating. For example, if you put 100 dollars in the bank in 1970, those same dollars today would only have about 17 percent of the purchasing power that they did back then. In essence, you were hit by an 83 percent “inflation tax” and all you did was leave your money in the bank. So who is responsible for this? Well, the Federal Reserve controls monetary policy in the United States…

China usually holds its military hand very close to the vest–that, or things “mysteriously” leak that it doesn’t (does) want the world to know about–so we’re left to wonder why the People’s Republic has decided to publish this in the journal Advanced Materials Research. Nonetheless, it’s pretty interesting. Chinese navy researchers have plans for a new submarine hunting scheme that uses ship-launched UAVs running genetic algorithms. Genetic algorithms narrow down a range of possibilities to an optimal solution much the way evolution does (at least in a simplified sense)–by weeding out the weaker offspring and mating the best with the best to create stronger candidates. These algorithms would take into account things like fuel economy, potential air and sea threats, and oceanographic geography to zero in on the most likely places for submarines to be moving at a given time.

Either intimidated into leaving or arrested… Either way he couldn’t File a Police Complaint

In addition to monitoring Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Meetup and Occupy live video feeds, the feds also relied on the left-leaning activist website Daily Kos for tracking protest locations. “The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence,” the report notes in its final paragraph. “While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI). The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters.” Hastings warned that there were “ominous” implications to this kind of information gathering.

The results of the shortage or lack of insurance coverage for generic Adderall XR forced many people to seek out name-brand Adderall XR, which, in turn, ran out. Then people, desperate for any ADHD medication, sought out the generic instant release amphetamine salts (formally Adderall). The increased demand on instant release dried up the supplies pretty quickly, and soon ADHD sufferers everywhere were unable to find any form of their medication. Luckily, Shire had magically possessed enough amphetamines from their DEA quota to produce plenty of their new ADHD medication, Vyvanse. In fact, Shire doubled its third quarter profits from 2010 to 2011, with most of that increase resulting from Vyvanse sales. During this time, coinciding nicely with the Adderall shortage, Shire hiked the price of Vyvanse.

The group’s reputation among foreign policy writers, analysts, and practitioners is poor; they are considered a punchline more often than a source of valuable information or insight. As a former recipient of their “INTEL REPORTS” (I assume someone at Stratfor signed me up for a trial subscription, which appeared in my inbox unsolicited), what I found was typically some combination of publicly available information and bland “analysis” that had already appeared in the previous day’s New York Times. A friend who works in intelligence once joked that Stratfor is just The Economist a week later and several hundred times more expensive. As of 2001, a Stratfor subscription could cost up to $40,000 per year.

As Facebook gets ready to go public, the eyes of the world will become even more focused on the Menlo Park-based social network. That’s just partly why Friday’s report of an insurance advertisement on Facebook featuring the face of 9/11 terrorist Mohamed Atta is not the type of publicity the site wants ahead of its initial public offering.

They meet every Saturday night on the second floor of a house, above a paint store. The services are a mix of traditional mass and metal that has biblical themes. The rosaries are made from chains and the bibles lined with denim. As the music reaches a crescendo, praises of the Lord are sung. Cristian asserts, “If Jesus were alive today, he would be neither a guerilla nor a metalhead. He would accept everyone without distinction and without reproach to anyone.” Can’t really argue with that!

Laughing tourists were either cynical or confused about whether a man was really suffering a medical episode amid the “doctor,” “nurses” and health warnings at the Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas, a restaurant owner said Wednesday. “It was no joke,” said Jon Basso, who promotes himself “Doctor Jon,” his scantily-clad waitresses as nurses and customers as patients. Basso said he could tell right away the man in his 40s eating a Triple Bypass burger was having trouble. He was sweating, shaking and could barely talk.

Scientists have discovered four new species of primitive eyeless insects, one of which they described as the deepest land animal ever found. These animals are springtails (Arthropoda, Insecta, Collembola), a minute primitive wingless insect with six-legs and without eyes that commonly live in total darkness in caves, where they feed on fungi and decomposing organic matter. Described by Rafael Jordana and Enrique Baquero from University of Navarra (Spain), they are known for science as: Anurida stereoodorata, Deuteraphorura kruberaensis, Schaefferia profundissima and Plutomurus ortobalaganensis. The last one is the deepest arthropod ever found, at the remarkable depth of 1.980 meters (2,165 yards) below ground surface. The insects were collected during the Ibero-Russian CaveX team expedition to the world’s deepest known cave during the summer of 2010.

Namely, female nipples or even the impressions of nipples under clothing are unacceptable to Facebook censors, whereas male nipples are fine. Images of breast feeding, too, are forbidden if they show an exposed nipple. “Crushed heads” and mutilated limbs are also fine, so long as the person posting such images does not express delight and no internal organs are visible. The list specifically says that on this point, no exceptions would be made for news media. Also verboten: images of bodily fluids, including ear wax and pus; dead animals; advocacy of violence; advocacy of eating disorders; racial jokes where “the humor is not evident”; and “any photoshopped images of people, whether negative, positive or neutral”; “pixelated or black-barred content showing nudity or sexual activity”; “digital/cartoon nudity”; and images of drunk or sleeping people with “things drawn on their faces.”

In the text of the act, the law is allowed to be used against anyone who knowingly enters or remains in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so, but those grounds are considered any area where someone — rather it’s President Obama, Senator Santorum or Governor Romney — will be temporarily visiting, whether or not the public is even made aware. Entering such a facility is thus outlawed, as is disrupting the orderly conduct of “official functions,” engaging in disorderly conduct “within such proximity to” the event or acting violent to anyone, anywhere near the premises. Under that verbiage, that means a peaceful protest outside a candidate’s concession speech would be a federal offense, but those occurrences covered as special event of national significance don’t just stop there, either. And neither does the list of covered persons that receive protection.

But the line between mockery and hysteria may prove very thin, indeed, with one report at Consternation Security positing that, in the wake events such as the Iranian army overriding and capturing an RQ-170 drone, Anonymous might be able to hijack the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. It is with HAARP, Consternation claims to report seriously under a shimmering photo of an aurora, that hackers could, after inciting bouts of “headaches, dizziness, confusion, and even insanity,” “quite literally cook the President while he sleeps.”

Last summer, punk rock icon Jello Biafra and his band decided to cancel a show they had planned on playing at the Barby Club in Tel Aviv. At the time, Biafra wrote that ‘the toll and stress on the band members and myself has been huge, both logistically and as a matter of conscience’. In August, Biafra decided to travel to Israel and Palestine himself to explore his thoughts on the cultural boycott of Israel.

An extended campaign in Nevada by Google has led to a new host of provisions which will allow automated cars to legally drive in the state. Starting March 1st, 2012 innovators like Google can officially apply for a new kind of robot driver’s license that will give them permission to openly test their cars on the road. Automated vehicles will be able to travel the same streets and highways as human drivers, with only a red license plate marking them as robots. Once research on those automated cars is complete (which may take years), the Nevada Department of Motorized Vehicles will issue them a neon green license plate – an indication that the robot drivers are good to go.

Shocking photos of accused pedophile Mark Berndt offer a glimpse into his disturbing behavior at scandal-rocked Miramonte Elementary School in South Los Angeles. In the newly-surfaced pictures, the 61-year-old is seen wearing a bizarre costume clearly geared to the Disney set. He sports Mickey Mouse ears, a form-fitting black shirt and tiny baby-blue satin running shorts over black tights, with an arm draped around a little girl dressed as a fairytale princess. Berndt completes his over-the-top child-like appearance with a half-eaten cupcake in his hand and green frosting smeared on his mustache. The 61-year-old teacher faces multiple life sentences. He currently has been charged with 23 counts of lewd acts on children. Police say Berndt blindfolded students, taped their mouths and photographed them with a cockroach crawling on their faces. He is also accused of conducting “tasting games” in which he fed students semen from a spoon and cookies laced with the same bodily fluid.

Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano has a message for everyone who thinks the drug war is bad: you’re wrong, it’s awesome. (Reuters) – Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano defended Washington’s drug war strategy on Monday despite calls by some Latin American leaders to consider decriminalizing narcotics. … “I would not agree with the premise that the drug war is a failure,” Napolitano said. “It is a continuing effort to keep our peoples from becoming addicted to dangerous drugs.”

Now here’s something you don’t often hear about. Two warehouses containing iPhone branded gas stoves got seized by the state police at Wuhan, after discovering they are not real Apple products

Russian Cossacks are to stand guard over Moscow’s Orthodox churches after a feminist punk band broke into a Cathedral and sang blasphemous songs at the altar. ­Earlier this month, four members of the all-girl band Pussy Riot rushed the church dressed in mini-dresses and wearing masks. Without losing time, they sang a song entitled Holy S**t before being escorted out by security. The girls are notorious for their publicity stunts. They’ve performed a song on Red Square addressed to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Now the Cossack say, “Let’s protect the holy shrines!”, promising to create vigilante groups to protect a number of churches in the Russian capital.

“As we listened to our top nuclear experts, we politicians had no idea what they were talking about. Was anyone going to suffer radiation contamination? Would this be another Chernobyl or Three Mile Island? No one could give us a straight answer,” Fukuyama recalled in the report. After 300 interviews with officials and nuclear experts, the report said government was partially at fault for not having an emergency plan if a magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck the country. However, investigators concluded the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric, was to blame for the majority of the problems. “They were astonishingly unprepared for this nuclear accident,” lead investigator Youichi Funabash told CBS News. It seems that Tokyo Electric was unprepared for a power failure. Without electricity, the cores of the reactor couldn’t stay cool, and it triggered explosions and meltdowns.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been paying a defense contractor $11.4 million to monitor social media websites and other Internet communications to find criticisms of the department’s policies and actions. A government watchdog organization, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), obtained hundreds of documents from DHS through the Freedom of Information Act and found details of the arrangement with General Dynamics. The company was contracted to monitor the Web for “reports that reflect adversely on DHS,” including sub-agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This Stossel special will blow your mind! The government, especially the EPA is out of control as well as local prosecutors trying to make a name for themselves.

“This operation shows that crime in the virtual world does have real consequences for those involved, and that the Internet cannot be seen as a safe haven for criminal activity,” said Interpol’s acting director of police services. However, it was not clear what evidence there was to prove those arrested were part of Anonymous, an extremely loose-knit international movement of online activists, or “hacktivists.” Spanish police said earlier they had arrested four suspected hackers accused of sabotaging websites and publishing confidential data on the Internet. They were accused of hacking political parties’ and companies’ websites and adding fangs to the faces of leaders in photographs online, and publishing data identifying top officials’ security guards, Spanish police said.

It is time — now, not next year — to de-occupy Walmart. And Archer Daniels Midland. And Tyson Foods. And Monsanto. And Cargill. And Kraft Foods. And the other large corporations that decide what ends up on our plates. Take all our money out, public and personal, from our shopping dollars to school district lunch contracts to the corporate subsidies that uphold these firms’ grip on our food supply, and invest it in a new system that’s economically diverse and ecologically sustainable. These corporations’ stranglehold over food has wreaked havoc on the environment, our health, farmers, workers, and our very future. It is time for an end to Big Food, and a societal shift to something radically different. We all deserve a future where what we eat feeds community and land, instead of eroding soils, polluting water and air, and tossing away small farmers and immigrant workers as if they were balance sheet losers.

While we’ve seen plenty of crazy boombox bikes in our day, this bicycle by Dutch designers Merel Sloother, Liat Azulay and Pieter Frank de Jong, takes that idea one step further into the past. A prototype of their Feats per Minute project, this retro-inspired ride allows riders to play records as they travel throughout the city. We’re assuming that pedaling faster will speed up the music — which could prove problematic unless you’re going for a leisurely ride or enjoy listening to chipmunks squeak — but we’re in love the concept, as long as no one comes riding down our street too early on the weekend.

Is this a freak occurrence? NO! It is a very common occurrence. It is a well-known error. One person has had to file over 100 disputes for mistaken bird sounds. For some reason Google is reluctant to fix this so companies like rumblefish take advantage of it to gain fraudulent income (google makes something also).